KENT COUNTY, Mich. — Grand Valley State University, Kent County and the Kent County Road Commission are working on a new initiative to analyze deer behavior in the community.
Jerry Byrne is the managing director for the Kent County Road Commission. He said the collaborative approach, called the Kent County Deer Management Coalition Project, is key to efficiently analyzing the animal.
"Let's do this as 21 townships, nine cities and villages, let's do this collectively because deer don't know where the jurisdictional boundary line is, and they're not going to stop there," he said.
From Monday, Dec. 2-16, teams of university students and staff will look for deer from 5:30-11 p.m.
He explained they'll search in, "selected areas out in the county based on where we've seen dead deer picked up, UD-10 police reports, in really the surroundings of terrain, the vegetation, the water sources."
All of this deer data will then be compared to eventually propose solutions.
"What are possible things we can do to reduce those car-deer crashes? To reduce the complaints about vegetation being eaten? Reduce what the farmers are seeing for loss of crops?"
He said those solutions could vary depending on the city or township.
A second round of this sort of data collection is then planned for the new year.
"There's over 6,700 accidents last year in the county, when 26% of those are car-deer crashes, there's no other single type of accident that's going to match that. So, if we could reduce that by 5 or 10%, be a huge benefit to the people that are injured, to your insurance rates," said Byrne.
Data collection is the second phase of this project. The first is a public survey you can find here.